Ancient Grammar In Context

Grammatical description and instruction have left their enduring imprint on European scholarship and culture. For more than twenty centuries, grammar has been the cornerstone of humanist education, and has been transmitted continuously, albeit in changing - chronologically, geographically, politically, and institutionally - contexts. The papers in this volume document the transmission, adaptation and re-elaboration of grammar, since Antiquity, by focusing on its foundational concepts and techniques. The vectors of these processes of transmission and adaptation are texts, and behind these texts, we can reconstruct networks of interaction: between teachers and students, between scholars and models of description, and - as the overarching dynamics - the dialogue between the members of the "virtual community" interested in the study of language. The seventeen papers of this volume have been arranged into six sections: "Grammar: The Fate of a Cultural Discipline"; "The Origins of Linguistic Reflection in Ancient Greece"; "Ancient Greek grammar: Theorization and Practice"; "Latin Grammar in Antiquity and the Low Middle Ages: Heritage and Innovation"; "Renaissance Grammar and Rhetoric: The Encounter between Classical Languages and the Vernaculars"; "Philological Deposits of Ancient Latin Grammars"). The volume is rounded off with detailed indices (Index of names; Index of Greek, Latin, and Latinized technical terms; Index of concepts).

Ancient Greek scholarship is currently in the centre of a multi-faceted and steadily growing research activity. The volume aims at investigating archetypes, concepts and contexts of the ancient philological discipline from a historical, methodological and ideological perspective. It includes 26 contributions by leading scholars divided into four sections: The ancient scholars at work, The ancient grammarians on Greek language and linguistic correctness, Ancient grammar in historical context and Ancient grammar in interdisciplinary context. The period examined coincides with the establishment of scholarship as an autonomous discipline from the 3rd century BC to its peak in the first centuries AD. Archetypes and paradigms of philological activity during the classical era help investigate the origins of ancient scholarship, and the interdisciplinary discourse between scholarship, philosophy of language and rhetoric is illustrated. Thus, the thematic spectrum of the volume stretches from the 4th century BC to the Byzantine era. Apart from the Greek antiquity, central aspects of the Latin grammatical tradition are also being examined.

This book explores the various views on language and its relation to philosophy in the Platonic tradition by examening the reception of Plato's Cratylus in antiquity in general, and the commentary of the Neoplatonist Proclus in particular.

This collective volume contains studies in the field of ancient grammar, poetics and philosophy of language. The contributions, written by specialists in the field, focus on central themes in the historiography of ancient linguistics, such as the status of grammar as a discipline in Antiquity, the relationship between poetics and grammatical theory, the constitution and development of the word class system, the descriptive format of grammars, the nature and description of specific word classes, the development of grammatical argumentation. In addition, several methodological issues in the study of ancient grammar and philosophy of language are dealt with: the problem of continuity vs. discontinuity in the history of linguistic thought, the role of schoolroom activities in the development of grammatical description and theory-formation, and problems concerning "tradition", "influence" and "originality" in ancient linguistics. The volume is rounded off with extensive indices of proper names, concepts and technical terms.

The contributions contained in this volume offer a multidisciplinary approach into the history of the parts of speech and their role in building phrases and sentences. They fulfill a current interest for syntactic problems for combining recent linguistic theories with the long tradition of the Classical studies. The studies cover a chronological range reaching from Aristotle to Priscian and deal with concepts like ῥῆμα and λóγος, or the two Aristotelian expressions λέξις εἰρομένη and λέξις κατεστραμμένη as well as διάβασις and μετάβασις in Apollonius Dyscolos and the corresponding Latin term transitio and finally the Latin pronouns qui or quis. Through the metalinguistic approach the authors tackle syntactic structures like dependency or government, syntactic features or properties such as transitivity or subject and predicate or the development of the syntactic role of pronouns in introducing relative sentences. Furthermore, in providing testimonies of the historical existence of the controversy anomaly-analogy, the history of this quarrel is drawn from the Alexandrinian tradition to the Latin one with emphasis on the studium grammaticae as a development of an independent field of study.